Remnants of Images

Description

Hanna Mina presents the events in “Remnants of Images” through the eyes of a child whose gaze is almost neutral, serving as the voice of a narrator, or a third-person voice speaking in the first person, much like Henry, who is essentially Ernest Hemingway himself, did in “A Farewell to Arms.” But in the process of removing the veil from the face of truth, we encounter images of the author’s own life—images that are remnants in the unconscious, incomplete consciousness, and fully conscious. This is revealed when the boy tells us at the end of the novel that he has stopped piecing together the fragments of his fading memories and the words of his family that linger in his mind, and that in the final chapters he relies on what he has personally witnessed. If fear is the fate of this child’s family in the novel, and the fate of each of its members, as the unfolding events reveal, then it is a social fate that surrounds the family within the confines of poverty, oppression, and persecution. This is because a greater power—the power of feudalism, princes, and the gendarmerie—imposes it upon them. Thus, a social reading of the novel finds its justification when we attempt to explore fear and its roots within a social system that confiscates individual freedom from birth, offering no opportunities to those born into poverty and burdening them with deprivation, ignorance, and disease in childhood, and with unemployment, anxiety, and displacement in adulthood. Therefore, a social reading of the novel lays bare many of society’s fundamental tragedies, or their underlying causes. It presents human misery, both internal and external, in simple words that transcend the barriers of time and place, transforming the entire issue into one of lost social justice and a floundering struggle for it. The events reveal the sources of fear, as well as the wild yet spontaneous individual and collective attempts to combat them. Unless the conditions of social life change, there is no way to achieve victory or social security.